Blog > Datascience & AI in Marketing and Retail > English Version: 10 Features that make Looker stand out from other BI tools!

English Version: 10 Features that make Looker stand out from other BI tools!

von Mona Makinian

29. November 2022

Lesedauer: 5 Minuten

Management Summary

Business Intelligence (BI) is the last mile of data analysis. Data sitting in the database has no value. There are various BI tools that provide solutions to visualize data. Most of them are designed for BI experts to work separately from other teams, unless some third party tools and data engineers are involved with massive coding to connect these tools together and automate the process in the end. None of these tools connect the dots from raw data connection to for example customer data activation in google ads. This is the main difference between Looker and other tools. Looker is the only self-service tool available that is created to minimize engineering and scientists effort.

Datascience & AI in Marketing and Retail

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Yes! Looker Helps to Speed Up your Company's Success - But More than Expected!

Looker is an enterprise cloud based solution for Business Intelligence. It’s built to make better decisions through smarter data driven experience. I will give you 10 reasons why looker is a perfect tool for your organization and is worth investing in.

Quelle: e-dialog

Looker is Built on top of Cloud and so is Fast.

Looker is architecturally different from other bi tools. Looker sits on top of your database and It means you can fully leverage the power of cloud databases such as BIg Query. Meaning if you can query petabytes of queries in big query, then you can query petabytes of query in looker without having to do anything special. Looker is on cloud. Everyone accesses the same version . There is no need to download.

With Looker, you don’t need to go to data scientists to build dashboards for you.

Users these days don’t look into data from one source but from different sources such as Ads data, social, YouTube, transactions. Data comes from different shapes and sizes and you need to join them somehow.

If you are an engineer it’s ok to reach and get data but for most people it’s not possible. They may not speak sql, may not understand how data is structured in db, may not have access. Looker helps users to get the data they need without the need of going to a data scientist to build a report for them.Y

10 Features that make Looker stand out from other BI tools

1. No need to write SQL anymore

Get trusted auto-generated queries (No Coding in) in Looker! Looker is a self-service product which means end users with no level of sql can make changes to the dashboards without the need to write or modify any queries. As all queries are auto-generated in Looker. This brings a maximum level of trust in your visualizations and insights.

2. Build dashboards based on a central business model and not single SQL queries

Define Centralized business logic once and build dashboards on a central logic! Most of the time, changing or updating a dashboard that is built by somebody else is challenging. You may not easily understand the logic behind the query or the person who wrote the query. You also may need to change all dashboards when a business logic is updated.

In looker you won’t face any of these problems, because you don’t deal with single SQL queries and you have a business model instead. Looker provides a modeling language called Lookml. Lookml is used to define the business logic once in a format that it can be used on the relevant dashboards. You don’t need to worry about how uptodate the logic behind the dashboards are, as once the model is changed, it affects all dashboards.

3. Drill down the charts for more dimensions

Quelle: e-dialog

Perform ad-hoc analysis in just a click (No Coding)! Ad hoc analysis is one of the main reasons that made Looker so popular. Since the core of looker auto generates sql queries, you can just click and go deeper into more metrics and dimensions without coding.

4. Audience Activation in Google Ads, facebook & more

Quelle: e-dialog

Looker sends your desired customer audiences – that you easily built via analysis & segmentation – to Google Ads via customer match (No Coding)!

You can also upload to Facebook Ads custom dimensions, Google Analytics custom Dataset or write to a bucket directly from Looker.

5. Simplify Complex Cloud Engineering (No Coding)

One of the main benefits of using Looker is that it minimizes coding effort. Not only you don’t need to go to a data scientist to ask for a report, but also you can skip engineering effort in many ways, for example you can activate segments in Google Ads using customer match directly in Looker.

Quelle: e-dialog

The example above compares engineering steps for a purchase propensity, targeting and bidding use case. As it is shown on the left side, using other BI tools such as Looker Studio (formerly Data Studio) requires more steps and coding in the cloud. On the other hand, Looker Studio would be the deadend. Whereas Looker on the right side puts your data in a loop from segmentation to activation and back to BigQuery for segmentation again in easy steps and without coding.

6. Looker is Beyond just a BI Tool

Use Looker as API, Build custom applications, Use in ML & AI workflow! Looker has a full set of APIs that can talk to other APIs, which let you push data out into other tools.

7. Looker is version controlled - Git repository

Your changes won’t be affected until it’s pushed to production. You can also use Open Source Git Community to clone published blocks by developers for free.

8. Looker Functions

Many functions don’t easily exist in SQL and coding them is sometimes challenging or not possible. Looker offers a Comprehensive List of Useful Functions! For example, intercept, rank, covar_samp (correlation), small (kth smallest value), ttest, z test (to analyze results of AB testing), pivot_where (conditional pivoting)

9. Get More than 100 pre built blocks and templates

Quelle: e-dialog

Looker takes you from database connection to insights in seconds! Use 100+ pre-built blocks for retention, cohort, analyzing results of BigQuery ML, etc.

10. Unique visualization

Quelle: e-dialog

Get visualizations that don’t exist in other BI tools! Looker offers a set of complete visualizations for outlier removal, funnel overview, etc.

Conclusion

We presented 10 main features in Looker that sets it apart from other available BI tools. Looker might be all you need to get the most out of your data, create segments and make on spot important decisions. Looker is beyond just a BI tool. It’s a complete package of self-service features that connects the dots in different departments of your company to success without the need to code and with zero-to-least engineering effort.

Let’s review some key takeaways for today. With Looker you can;

Fully leverage modern databases
Get Fast & trustable auto-generated queries
Go From database to insights in seconds
Perform Ad-hoc analysis without a data scientist
Do Segmentation, Activation and Personalization without a data scientist

Looker has in product live support. But we are also here to help if you have any questions in defining or developing the business model and dashboards. Please contact us at kontakt@e-dialog.group.

If you are new to Looker and are interested to learn more about how to get started with the tool, please send us an email to kontakt@e-dialog.group.

If you are interested to learn more, please check out my blog on Looker and Looker Studio (Pro)

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Weitere Themen

Datascience & AI in Marketing and Retail

English Version: 10 Features that make Looker stand out from other BI tools!

Management Summary

Yes! Looker Helps to Speed Up your Company's Success - But More than Expected!

Looker is Built on top of Cloud and so is Fast.

With Looker, you don’t need to go to data scientists to build dashboards for you.

10 Features that make Looker stand out from other BI tools

1. No need to write SQL anymore

2. Build dashboards based on a central business model and not single SQL queries

3. Drill down the charts for more dimensions

4. Audience Activation in Google Ads, facebook & more

5. Simplify Complex Cloud Engineering (No Coding)

6. Looker is Beyond just a BI Tool

7. Looker is version controlled - Git repository

8. Looker Functions

9. Get More than 100 pre built blocks and templates

10. Unique visualization

Conclusion

Looker has in product live support. But we are also here to help if you have any questions in defining or developing the business model and dashboards. Please contact us at kontakt@e-dialog.group.

If you are new to Looker and are interested to learn more about how to get started with the tool, please send us an email to kontakt@e-dialog.group.

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